Six Degrees of Supernatural Separation
by ebjameston
Summary: Derek Hale just wants to figure out how in the hell to be a professor and forget about the destroyed pack he left behind. 3000 miles away from everything and everyone he knows, this should be easy - right? Right. Stiles Stilinski walking into his life and announcing that the McCall pack's banshee has marked him for death, however, may complicate things.
1. Chapter 1

Derek Hale's first day of being a professor goes pretty well, all things considered. Some of the kids in his Shakespearian Lit class actually seem to have their brains turned on, the students in his Technical Writing course are snarky and clever, and half of his English Comp 102 class is just a little bit terrified of him.

Really, it couldn't have gone any better.

He might be humming to himself just a little as he crosses the quad at the end of the day. He'll grab some dinner on the way back to the spacious loft apartment he's still settling into, have a beer or two while making sure he's prepped for all of tomorrow's classes, and get to bed early enough that waking up for his normal 5AM run won't seem like torture.

His life here at Greymar University is simple. Uncomplicated. Normal.

_You should call home_, says a nagging little voice in the back of his mind.

_Yeah, no, _he thinks.

_Just to check in. The full moon's less than a week away and you haven't talked to them since the move._

Derek shuts that train of thought down hard. No. He hasn't talked to them, and he's not going to talk to them. It's over. It's done. He didn't move 3000 miles across the damn country to be haunted by the ghosts of his former pack.

This is precisely why the faint scent of _werewolf_ drifting across the quad slams into him so hard that he literally stops walking, causing a group of cross country runners to awkwardly skitter around him. He's torn between _fight_ and _panic _and _what the hell_? and turns all of his senses on high, zooming in on a tall brown-haired kid on the other side of the lawn. He's got a messenger bag slung across his chest, a cell phone pressed to one ear, and is wearing an oversized hoodie that he's cuffed back twice but still can't keep from falling over his hands.

"I'm the TA, Scott, of course I stayed after class, the little jerkbutts had a zillion questions," he's saying into his phone. "Look, will you just ask Isaac to vote on pizza or Thai? I know I said I'd cook, but I want to get ahead on my reading for tomorrow."

Derek finds himself following the guy, keeping far enough back that humans won't be able to tell unless they're paying very close attention. He and the person on the other end of the phone reach an agreement about pizza and he hangs up, and then Derek's just tracking him by his heartbeat and the complex mix of scents trailing him. _Werewolf_ is rolling off that ridiculously large sweatshirt, but the pervasive notes underneath it are fresh-cut grass, coffee beans, a hint of bonfire, slightly acidic medication, and – above all – _human_.

Derek tails him all the way to the parking lot north of campus, watches him climb into an old, light blue Jeep that looks like it's been to hell and back. For a brief, insane moment, Derek considers confronting him – whether to yell at him because how _dare _he bring this supernatural _crap_ back into his life or to say _Hi, I'm Derek, what's your name? _he hasn't decided – but he ends up just staring after his taillights, long after they've faded into the gathering dusk.

_Maybe he borrowed it from someone_, he rationalizes as he begins what'll be a 25-minute walk to his own car, in the faculty lot on the south side. _A friend from back home. Or maybe it's his roommate's boyfriend's from back home. His roommate's sister's boyfriend's brother's uncle's, who now lives in Russia. _

Because playing Six Degrees of Separation with the Supernatural has always worked out _so _well for him in the past.

* * *

Derek doesn't see the kid again for awhile, and he actually allows himself to think that it was a fluke. Maybe – just maybe – the kid really had just borrowed the sweatshirt from someone else. So Derek focuses on surviving his first two weeks of professorship, and it's honestly not that bad – he actually likes some of his students, his colleagues are friendly and welcoming, and it turns out that the Pacific Northwest is pretty great place to be a werewolf. There's a huge forest bordering the ocean out west of campus and he spent the night of the full moon just _running. _Based on some preliminary topographical research (mainly courtesy of Google Earth), it looks like this whole region is densely wooded enough that he could feasibly run from Greymar's campus – 50-ish miles south of Portland – to Seattle to Denver and back, without ever crossing into civilization. He'd have to clear it with all the local packs, of course, and he'd have to be incredibly fucking bored to give it a whirl but the fact that he could if he wanted to is pretty damn freeing. His days are full of intellectual chatter with people that, for the most part, don't entirely make him want to jump out of his skin, and after classes he retreats to his apartment to bask in the still-foreign glory that is actually being _alone_ and having some privacy.

And if the quiet is sometimes just a little too quiet, well, this is what he signed up for.

Then he rounds the corner on the library and literally mows the kid over, sending all of his books and Derek's stack of his Comp 102 class's first offerings to the ground.

"Crap on a stick!" The guy exclaims, rubbing his forehead from where it careened into Derek's shoulder. "Are you okay? I'm so sorry, I totally wasn't looking where I was going, completely my fault, are you okay? This is so like me, you know, you're, like, the tenth person I've run into today – sorry, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Derek says when the human stops to breathe. He stoops to help collect the other's books – everything from Norse mythology to Germanic languages to Differential Equations. "Are you?"

"Me? Oh yeah, I'm good, I'm great, totally okay. Like I said, I've been bouncing off people all day."

He continues to babble about nothing, giving Derek plenty of time to reassess his scent – grass and coffee and fire and acid, and irretrievably human. The werewolf scent is still there, but he can almost place the familiarity now. The Hale pack was never overly involved with humans, but some of the packs they were friendly with would show up at the Summer Solstice festival with a human or two in tow, and Derek remembers at least two mated humans in the Donovan pack. This kid isn't mated to a werewolf – that's an entirely different scent – but he's around them a lot. Lives with them, maybe, or is actually one of a pack's humans.

Derek is royally screwed.

"What are you doing at the library at 2AM on a Saturday, anyway?" He asks, interrupting the guy's tenth apology. A large portion of his brain wants him to just grab his stuff and get the hell away from he-who-runs-with-wolves, but he's so morbidly curious about this boy that he can't stop the traitorous question from escaping.

The human unfolds himself from the ground one limb at a time, all elbows and knees. "Reading. You see, this is a library, and it contains a bunch of these things called _books_."

Derek just barely contains his eye roll. "Anything interesting?"

The boy's heartrate picks up. "Oh. Uh, well, it's mostly just stuff for class…wait, aren't you Professor Hale?"

He blinks. "Yeah, that's me."

"Oh, cool – I tried to get in to your Shakespearian Lit class, but the roster was full. Are you teaching it again next semester?"

He blinks again. Whatever he was expecting out of this encounter, it wasn't a discussion of his teaching schedule. "No, probably not until fall of next year."

The boy's face falls, almost comically. "Ah, okay. Bummer. Well – nice to meet you!"

He takes off toward the north parking lot again, and Derek is once again torn between wanting to follow and wanting to fling himself off a cliff for even considering it. And being really, really confused because that boy – no matter what else he might be and whatever ties to hellhounds or pixies or mermaids he may have – is just plain _weird _and disarming.

He settles for calling his little sister when he gets back to his apartment.

"Derek!" Cora answers, surprise clear in her voice. "I didn't think you'd call."

"I wasn't really planning on it," he admits, putting the phone on speaker and leaving it on the kitchen counter. "I miss you, kiddo, but I just…"

"I know," Cora says quietly. "I'd leave too, if I could."

"Just a few more years," he calls, stripping off his tie and toeing his shoes into a corner. He still feels guilty for leaving Cora behind, but his appeal to become her legal guardian in the wake of their parents' death was denied. And if he'd stayed, he would have ended up doing something stupid and reckless and violent out of misplaced rage and guilt.

Something _else_ stupid and reckless and violent.

"You can come out to Greymar for school. Or Oregon, or UW."

She doesn't respond immediately, then says, "Full moon was weird without you. With it just being me and Uncle Peter."

He swings back to the counter and scoops up the phone. "I can imagine. It was okay, though?"

She sighs, and he imagines her flopping back onto the rug in her bedroom in the pack house back in Maine. The way she used to, before that house burned down. "Okay, I guess. Uncle Peter found a pack upstate and he's been thinking about talking to them."

"This soon?" Peter talking to another pack can only mean that he's thinking about negotiating a merge. Derek grabs the stack of ungraded essays and drops them by the side of his bed. "It's only been…"

"It's been over three years." Cora says. "It's been over three years since the fire, and we're small and weak in a pack this little, especially since you left. Plus he says he's worried about me not socializing with wolves my own age."

"So you'd want him to do it?"

"I dunno. What do you think?"

Derek sprawls across his bed. "It doesn't really matter what I think. I'm not your Alpha-to-be anymore, Cora – I'm not even pack anymore."

"You could change that. You could just come back. Come _home_, Derek."

"It's not my home anymore, kid," he says, as gently as he can. "Take care of yourself, okay?" He hangs up before she can respond and plugs the phone in to charge overnight, studiously not thinking about his family as he forces himself into a restless sleep.

* * *

The third time he sees the boy, it's at a coffee shop across the street from his apartment building and he spots him through the window as he returns from a long, lazy Sunday morning run. The kid's got books, notebooks, and a laptop spread out across a table and a deep furrow between his eyebrows, and Derek makes a split-second decision to walk in and talk to him again.

He orders a coffee and a scone, watching him out of the corner of his eye as he waits for his order to be up. The guy never seems to be still – always drumming the end of a pencil against the table, tapping out a rhythm against the corner of the table, shifting to a different chair to study a new set of notes.

"Who exactly are you?" Derek says without introduction when he receives his scone, taking the empty seat across the table.

The boy crinkles his nose, but doesn't look up from his laptop. "What sort of a question is that?"

Derek shrugs, carefully keeping his face passive. "I saw you on the first day of class. Then again two weeks later, when I ran into you leaving the library at 2am. Today you appear at the coffee shop across from my apartment, but I still don't even know your name. Asking you who are seems like a logical question."

The boy squints up at him, and Derek is momentarily startled by the depth in the light brown eyes. "You do realize that recounting every time you've seen me is a little creepy. And makes you sound like a stalky stalker who stalks."

He shrugs again and takes a sip of his coffee. "You're the one within spitting distance of where I live."

"Fine," he sighs. "But only because I need a break from geomapping the land from here to Canada. I'm Stiles. I'm a junior here at Greymar University. Undeclared. I hail from Beacon Hills, California, and I have contacts in law enforcement who will not hesitate to run a background check."

"What kind of a name is 'Stiles?'"

"The kind of nickname you give yourself in kindergarten when your actual first name contains more letters than the former Czechoslovakia. Is it my turn now?" The boy shuts his laptop.

"What?"

"I can only assume we're playing 20 Questions. You asked yours, so now it's my turn."

He sits back in his chair. "Go ahead."

The boy – Stiles – leans forward to make up the space between them and plants his chin in the palm of his hand. "How exactly does a werewolf end up teaching English at a lesser-known American university?"

Derek splutters so hard that coffee snorts up into his sinuses and holy _crap_, does that burn for a second before the healing kicks in. "What – what – _what_?"

Stiles rolls his eyes. "Oh, come on, Professor Hale. Let's skip all the awkward introductory steps. We've known you were a werewolf since before you were even offered the job."

He splutters again and shoots darting glances at all the tables close to them, but none of the other patrons seem to be clued in on the conversation. "_We_?"

Stiles arches an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you can't smell the pack on me. I'm told that even when showering regularly, it's not something that just washes off. Yes, _we_. Eight of us here at Greymar."

He sits even further back in his chair, stunned. How in the hell did he not notice a pack of eight – a decently sized pack by any standard – running around campus? Greymar's not exactly a huge place.

When Derek doesn't immediately respond, Stiles continues right on talking, undeterred. "You can stop glaring at the adorable old couple next to us, you know. I charmed a line around the table so no one would look at my addendum to the bestiary based on the rugaru Ethan and Cole took out last week and get the wrong idea, and it covers auditory cloaking, too."

Derek finally manages to marshal his face back under control and looks at Stiles flatly. "I have no idea what you just said."

The boy heaves a dramatic sigh, scribbles something on a corner of notebook paper, and tears it off and hands it over. "Here. There's a pack meeting tonight at that address, 7 o'clock. It's about time everyone started getting to know one another."

Derek looks at the address – it's a street he knows, just off the west end of campus. He pushes back from the table, slightly in a daze. There are dozens of questions swirling around in his head, but nothing he can pin down. Stiles already has his laptop open and is back to typing furiously. He's two steps from the door when Stiles calls, "Hey, Sourwolf!" and he looks back on instinct.

The boy grins a wide, wild grin. "Leave the coffee."

Yeah. Derek is definitely screwed.

* * *

Derek spends most of the afternoon trying not to break shit in his apartment and attempting to distract himself through menial labor. Move the couch here, move the couch there, assemble this bookshelf he got from Ikea that has eight thousand tiny wooden parts and blob-like figures in the instruction books that look so fucking thrilled about the eight thousand wooden parts -

How? _How_ did he not know? He _checked _for local packs before he accepted the job out here – had Peter ask all of his contacts, and –

Peter.

His phone is in his semi-clawed hand with an outbound call to Peter ringing before he even finishes processing the thought.

"Nephew!" Peter answers, his voice overly jovial. That's how things always are with Peter, hopping from one extreme to the next – he's _too_ happy, then he's _too_ depressed, then he's _too _murderous to even be in the same room with when his thoughts fall to the Argent girl who set the fire that burned nearly their entire family alive –

"Peter," Derek curtly growls. "Did you know?"

"Did I know what? It is _so _good to hear your voice."

Derek lets his claws fully slide out and then digs them into the fleshy part of his palm, allowing the pain to push him back to human form. Fangs make talking on the phone kind of challenging. He struggles to keep his voice calm as he re-asks the questions, this time being specific – that's another thing about Peter. He'll dodge anything unless he is firmly, inescapably pinned in your sights. "When I asked you to check the area surrounding Greymar for existing packs, and you came back two days later and said no, the closest pack would be the Ritter family in Portland, and they were okay with me living just outside their territory. Did you know about the pack of eight that apparently fucking _attend_ the school?"

There's a beat of silence, then Peter says, "Ah, well. I couldn't exactly risk you falling to Omega, could I, nephew?"

"So you risked sending me, unannounced, into a strange pack's territory without even letting me _know_ so I could do them the common courtesy of saying 'Hey, I'm Derek, promise I'm not trying to kill anyone, I'm just here to teach'? Peter, they could have _killed_ me!"

"Did they?"

Peter's abrupt question stops Derek in the act of shredding the bookshelf's instruction packet into confetti. "What?"

"Did they kill you? Or try to? Have they been even slightly hostile?"

Derek sinks slowly to the couch. "No. Not really. One of them invited me to a pack meeting tonight."

He can practically hear Peter's oily grin spreading on the other end of the phone. "Good. Derek, I know your opinion of me isn't very high, but you're one of my last remaining family members. As I said, I didn't want to risk you falling to Omega, even though you seemed so determined to do so when you left here. When you asked me about Greymar and I found out about the McCall pack, it seemed like the best option out of a host of shitty ones."

Derek's quiet, thinking. Peter cursing means that he's falling out of his crappy "I'm the Alpha" façade and might actually be capable of holding a real conversation. "What did you find out about them?"

"Not much, honestly, but they've gone up against a lot of bad shit in the past and come out the other side mostly intact. I spoke with their Alpha and Emissary before you moved. They won't make you join, but they're fine with you being on claimed land so long as you agree not to harm anyone. Even said they'd watch out for you against hunters in the area."

"Peter, I – "

"Yeah, yeah, I know," the older wolf cuts him off, and for a second it's like they're kids again – Derek's 6, Peter's 13, conspiring on a prank to play on Laura. And then the armor _schicks_ back up into place when Peter continues, "Very well, nephew, is there anything else?"

"I – uh – no," Derek manages, still reeling from the information and the fact that some part of Peter – no matter how minute – actually seems to still care. "Thanks, Alp – thanks, Peter."

The phone makes a small _click _when Peter disconnects, and Derek stares at it in astonishment before shaking himself out and digging a roll of Scotch tape out of a drawer. Time to reassemble the happy blob figures and get back to putting the bookshelf together.

* * *

At 7:02, Derek is standing outside a renovated firehouse, checking the address from Stiles' note against the GPS on his phone and wondering if he's making a big mistake. He left his old pack – what was left of his family – and moved clear across the country to start a new, supernatural-free life. Being a werewolf ended up causing so much heartbreak and loss that he all but swore it off, so what is he doing, about to willingly walk into another pack's territory?

It's Peter's words that get him in the end. And common sense, really – he likes Greymar so far, and if there's already a pack here, custom dictates that he should at least try to be on friendly terms with them and make it clear that he's not a threat. Tentatively, he knocks on the door, and pattering footsteps inside preclude Stiles swinging open the door while shouting over his shoulder, "Isaac, don't encourage him!" before turning back to Derek and giving him that same wild grin from earlier.

"Hey! Glad you made it. Come in! Shoes stay by the door." Stiles walks back into the house immediately, leaving Derek pretty much no choice but to kick off his boots and follow. He catches up as they enter what looks like a main living area, and Derek is immediately faced with 6 snarling, half-shifted werewolves, one amused-looking human male who offers a friendly wave from one of the several couches in the room, and Stiles, who stomps a foot on the ground, mutters something under his breath, and causes a ring of mountain ash to fall out of the sky and into a perfect circle around Derek.

"Cool, Stiles!" Remarks the other human.

"Thanks," Stiles says, brushing imaginary dust from his hands. "Been working on that one. Now, Derek, sorry for the upfront hostility, but – guys! Seriously, with the Beta faces? We talked about this!"

One of the wolves abruptly shifts back, revealing himself to be a tall, lanky guy in his early twenties with curly blond hair. "You're the one with the mystical circle of mountain ash."

"Yeah, which renders all other forms of aggression basically _redundant_, Isaac." Stiles shoots an exasperated look at the wolf standing closest to Derek. "You going to help me out on this?"

The wolf flashes red eyes at Derek once, before turning to the rest of his pack. "He's right, guys. Everyone back down."

One by one, they all return to fully human, and Derek is left in a room of –

"Kids," he says, startled. "You're all just kids."

"_Kids_ is what we were six years ago when a rogue Alpha showed up in Beacon Hills and started biting anything that moved," says the Alpha, turning back to Derek. Derek appraises the way he moves, the way the rest of the pack seems to orbit him, and although the guy's young, there's something _right _about him, and Derek knows without a doubt that he'd submit to this wolf. He'd be a Beta to this Alpha, and he'd trust this Alpha to lead him.

If he were, you know, looking for a pack. Because he's not.

"A lot's happened since then," the Alpha continues. "We're not kids anymore."

Derek holds up his hands innocently. "I didn't mean offense. I come from a family-based pack, not a self-made one. I'm not used to everyone in a pack being the same age."

"We know about your old pack. Like I said earlier, we did our homework on you before you were even hired here," Stiles says, and then his eyes darken. "We're sorry that you've lost so many people you care for."

Derek struggles to keep his emotions off his face. "It was a long time ago."

"We've lost people longer ago," says one of the other betas, a boy with short brown hair and an absurdly strong jawline. The human boy reaches out to take his hand. "We still miss them."

Derek swallows hard against the lump in his throat. "What am I doing here?"

"This is our third year on this campus," says the blond one – Isaac.

_Funny, _Derek thinks, _how the Alpha's so content to let his betas speak for him_. Back home – and in all the other packs he encountered growing up – Alphas were always the primary speakers, especially with an outsider in the mix. Alphas, or the pack's Emissary. He tunes back in to hear Isaac finish some sentence with, "…so no one has any problems."

"I'm not looking for trouble," Derek says. "I didn't even know there were other werewolves at Greymar. I just needed…something different."

"That's what your uncle said," Stiles says thoughtfully. "He's a total creep, by the way."

"Do you want to join our pack?" The Alpha asks sharply.

"No," Derek says emphatically.

"Do you mean harm to our pack?"

"No! I just said, I didn't even know you guys were here."

The Alpha nods to Stiles, and Stiles slides a few steps to break the circle of mountain ash with a socked foot. The Alpha strides forward, smiling broadly, and shakes Derek's hand firmly. "Great! I'm Scott McCall, and I run this little shindig."

"He _thinks_ he does," Stiles says with a roll of his eyes. "Everyone knows I'm actually the one in charge."

"About that," Derek interrupts before the introductions can continue. The abrupt changes in atmosphere are making his head hurt, but he definitely has questions. "What are you? With the whole magic circles thing?"

Stiles grins. "Longer story that we've got time for now, buddy. C'mon, meet the rest of the pack."

And so he does. The Beacon Hills contingent is Scott and Stiles, along with Isaac Lahey, who's Scott's second, and Ethan Bresner, who's dating the pack's other resident human, Danny Mahealani. Newer to the pack are Bree Thompson, who's a year younger than the rest of them and met them by chance when she decided to attend Greymar, and Cole and Tiffany –

"Argent," Derek snarls, dropping into a fighting stance and letting his fangs slide out. _Argent, like Kate, like my entire family burning alive - _Bree and Scott throw themselves in front of him, but it's Stiles who puts a hand on his chest and forces him to take several steps back in quick succession to avoid being knocked on his ass by the sheer power rolling off the human in waves.

"Cole, Tink, you good?" Stiles demands, without breaking eye contact with Derek.

"Yeah," comes a shaky response from behind her. A shaggy head of blond hair and huge brown eyes peek out at him from between pack members' elbows, and Derek realizes that Cole's even younger than Bree.

"Yes, _Argent_," Stiles confirms, apparently satisfied that Cole and Tiffany are okay for the moment. "And _ours_. We know what Kate Argent did to you, Derek, but this pack has a long history of allegiance with certain Argents, and when Cole and Tink were turned accidentally, we got them away from other, less understanding family members. Is this going to be a problem?"

Derek is caught in a swirl of hazy, nightmarish flashbacks and guilt. A girl he thought he loved, a broken trust, flames illuminating the night, the smell and sound, his mother's screams…

"HEY!" A shout breaks through his memories and drags him back to the present. "I said, is this going to be a problem?"

Slowly, Derek shakes his head and straightens up, willing his fangs to recede into his gums. "No. No, I can't…it's fine. I'm okay."

Convinced that Derek isn't about to slash anyone's throat, Stiles pushes through the pack to the Argents and pulls each one in for a hug. "You sure you're okay, kiddos?"

"Bloody brilliant," the boy, Cole, sighs, and it's that's not a sure sign that he's British, Derek doesn't know what is. "Just startled me for a mo', that's all."

"You okay with him staying, Cole?" Scott asks, still holding Derek in place with Alpha eyes.

"It's all right, Alpha," the boy says, slowly making his way forward, keeping Stiles' fingers locked in his. The other Argent, the one Stiles keeps calling Tink, looks even younger, and trails them with a finger locked in Cole's belt loop. Cole comes to stand in front of Derek and looks up at him evenly. "I'm not Kate," he says. "Neither is Tink. We never even met her. I'm a wolf now, and I got tossed out of my family. This is my family now – my pack. Tink?"

Cole loops an arm backwards and pulls the girl forward. She scuffs at the carpet with her toes for a few seconds, giving Derek time to further study her. She can't be more than twelve or thirteen, and with the blonde pixie cut and the tiny frame – the nickname makes sense.

Cole prods her in the side again to make her speak. "'M not Kate," she finally says. "Look, you don't have to, like, _like _me or whatever, but me and Cole are stuck here and so – yeah. Pack, family. Whatever."

Derek stares at the little former hunters. He still doesn't trust either – probably never will – but there's so much earnestness shining up out of the Cole's eyes and so much careful indifference from Tink that he shrugs and relegates his well-earned trust issues to a corner of his mind.

A timer goes off somewhere to Derek's left, and Danny's up off the couch in an instant. "Dinner's ready!"

The pack cheers, and the tension in the room dissipates so quickly that Derek's almost not sure it was real to begin with. Again with the group mood swings.

* * *

Dinner with the McCall pack is comfortable. It's so comfortable that it makes Derek _un_comfortable, and he finds himself thinking back through the bookshelf instructions and trying to figure out what he missed that caused the entire thing to collapse in a pile of sawdust when he put the first book on it so he doesn't have to pay attention to how amazing it feels to be around a functioning pack again. Everyone is smiling and laughing, and they bicker in that way you can only do when you know someone's in your life for good. He tries not to notice the easy physical contact between everyone – Isaac and Danny's shoulders pressed together as they dish out seconds and thirds, Bree and Tink linking elbows throughout most of the meal, Scott's hand trailing along the backs of everyone's necks when he gets up to use the bathroom. He tries not to hear the calm, quiet conversation Scott and Cole have in a corner of the kitchen when the meal's wrapping up ("You don't have to call me Alpha, Cole, we've talked about this." "I _know_, I wasn't thinking, it just came out!").

He even attempts to ignore the casual way they follow pack dynamics – Scott's the first one to take a bite of food, the younger ones look to Isaac for guidance if Scott's busy, the entire conversation seems to flow through Stiles – but it's too damn interesting not to watch. With his dad and mom as Alpha and Second growing up, it never really occurred to him to watch the power flow between them, because it was just normal family stuff. Here, though, with Scott and Isaac in those roles, it's somehow still just as easy, just as natural.

He's having some trouble reconciling Stiles with Cassidy, though.

Cassidy was his family's Emissary before the fire, and while she was perfectly nice – if you could ignore the occasional fortune-cookie, Yoda-esque advice – she was never this _involved_. Derek can't imagine an Emissary actually living with the pack she serves, or being this familiar with them.

"Derek? Derek!"

He blinks out of his train of thought to find everyone looking at him.

"You okay?" Danny asks. "Looks like you spaced out there for a second."

"I'm fine," Derek says. "Just a lot to take in. I'm still trying to figure out how I never noticed the eight of you on campus except for Stiles those couple of times."

"Do I look old enough for university?" Tink snarks, and he'd be offended by her tone but it's the first time she's spoken without being asked a direct question all night. "I'm in junior high."

"And I attend high school," Cole continues. "We both go to school in Stovington, so you wouldn't have seen or smelt us on campus."

"I'm human, but you wouldn't be able to smell me – or Ethan's scent on me – unless you're in the Computer Sciences buildings," Danny offers. "I don't often come out of the lab during daylight hours."

"Or nighttime hours," Ethan grumbles, and Derek gets the feeling that this is just a snippet of a long-running conversation. "But yeah, I'm 25, so I'm done with school. I'm a Stovington City cop. Not a lot of cause for me to be on campus."

"And you've seen me around," Stiles says. "So really it's just the three of them…" he gestures broadly to Scott, Isaac, and Bree, "that you missed."

That doesn't exactly make Derek feel better.

When the meal wraps up, Derek makes himself useful by volunteering to wash dishes, and Scott designates Isaac as the drier. They lapse into a companionable silence, and Derek thanks his lucky stars that not everyone in this pack feels the need for constant chatter, like one Stiles Stilinski.

Because yes, with the last name tagged to the nickname, it's _Stiles Stilinski_.

Derek watches the rest of the pack mill about in the living room. Scott's said that there's actual pack business to deal with, so they're killing time until kitchen clean-up is done. Bree, Cole, and Tink are trying to pick a movie to watch after the meeting wraps up; Scott and Stiles are laughing over some YouTube video; Ethan's reading a book on the couch while Danny leans against his legs and does some sort of work on a laptop that makes a sound like a jet engine when he fires it up.

"You okay, man?" Isaac asks after a few minutes, having caught Derek staring at the three youngest pack members for a beat too long. The question is casual, but Derek can feel tension rising in the other man, and he knows in an instant that his dish-cleaning partner wasn't assigned at random. They don't trust him yet, and Derek suspects he'll need to spend a lot of time with Scott, Isaac, and Stiles before that changes.

Does he want that to change? Does he want this pack to trust him?

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," he says quickly, shifting his gaze down to the bowl he's washing. "In some ways, this is so like my old pack, but in others…"

"They're Argents, but they're ours," Isaac says, echoing Stiles' earlier words.

"How? If you don't mind my asking."

Isaac thinks for a moment, apparently trying to figure out what details to divulge. "Hunter families have rites of initiation."

"The Argents here make a silver bullet," Derek offers.

"Or arrowhead. Yeah. For the Argents in Europe, hunters go on their first solo hunt when they turn 17. The situation's meant to be carefully controlled, but Cole somehow ended up facing an Alpha on his own. He was bitten, obviously, but still managed the kill – you know the cure, how if you kill the one that bit you, you can be cured of lycanthropy? Doesn't work so well when there's nowhere for the Alpha's power to go. So Cole, newly-made Alpha, freaks out and instead of going to the hunters' ceremonial grounds like he's supposed to, goes home for help."

Derek lets out some sort of muffled moan.

"Yeah, so you can see where this is going," Isaac says. "Tink, his 12-year-old sister, not being a full hunter, isn't at the ceremony. She opens the door, Cole can't control the shift, out of his mind with Alpha power, and bites her."

Derek gives a low whistle. "Isn't…" he glances up at the living room, making sure Cole and Tink aren't listening in. "Isn't it part of the Code that if that happens, they're supposed to, you know…"

"Yeah, and they nearly did." Isaac takes the last bowl from Derek and signals for him to drain the sink. "Cole and Tink's parents are real old-school types, and wanted to go through with what they saw as mercy killings. Luckily, one of our Argents, Allison, had made some progress with other cousins during a summer she spent in France and set up contacts with Jackson, a former packmate of ours living in London. The cousins got Cole and Tink to Jackson, and he got them to us."

"You guys done yet?" Scott calls.

"Just about!" Isaac returns, and the next second he's up in Derek's personal space, blue beta eyes flashing a warning. "I get that it's a long story, and that you've got trust shit to work through when it comes to the Argents. And you're not in this pack, so you don't have to like them or even interact with them – that's cool, whatever. But consider this your official warning, Hale. If you ever do a single thing to harm either of them, I will personally rip your limbs off and stuff each stump with wolfsbane before asking Stiles to set you on fire with this nifty little black flame curse he's got up his sleeve. They're important to me. We clear?"

Derek's got at least 20 pounds of muscle on Isaac, but the sheer, unadulterated fury in the younger wolf's eyes is enough to make him uncertain if he'd win in a fight, especially as an Omega, and that doubt seems to have paralyzed his vocal cords. He manages to nod, and Isaac backs off and moves to head to the living room.

Derek clears his throat. "Wait, Isaac. Where's Allison now? She's obviously not here, so is she still in France? Or in London, with the other one – Jackson?"

Isaac pauses, but doesn't look back. "Allison's one of the ones we lost," he says, so quietly that Derek can barely hear it, and then continues out into the living room where he scoops Tink up over a shoulder and ignores her squeals of protest. Derek follows more sedately, still processing, and settles into an armchair on the fringes of the group.

"All right, guys," Scott says, clapping his hands a few times after extricating himself from an impromptu wrestling match with Ethan. "I'm officially calling this meeting of the McCall pack – plus guest – to order." He turns to Derek. "Since you're not actually part of the pack, you can't really be here for official pack business stuff, sorry, dude."

"Right, sorry," Derek begins. "I'm new to this whole Omega thing."

"But you also can't go just yet," Scott continues, causing Derek to freeze halfway through the act of pushing himself out of the armchair. Does he know too much about Cole and Tink now, so they'll have to force him to join up or kill him? Are they actually going to kick him off claimed territory for not being buddy-buddy enough? Is Peter hiding in a corner somewhere, waiting to spring out and force him to swear eternal fealty or some equally arcane bullshit? Scott can apparently read the worry on Derek's face, because he says, "Aw, crap, sorry – I'm no good at this stuff, Stiles, could you maybe…?"

The Alpha turns a set of puppy dog eyes on Stiles, who groans and lifts his head from Bree's lap. "Seriously? Dude, being your Emissary is such a load of crap, you just use me when you don't feel like putting enough words together to make a sentence."

Derek manages not to react to that externally – _yeah, Stiles is _definitely _not from the same school of Druidism as Cassidy _– and focuses on Stiles turning to face him. The boy makes a few expansive gestures with his hands before saying, "Anyway! Derek. Yeah, the reason you can't leave is because we told your uncle we'd watch out for you if any hellish shit came your way, and we're reasonably certain that you've been marked for death."


	2. Chapter 2

Derek responds to the incredibly underwhelming declaration of his impending doom with merely a tweaked eyebrow, and Stiles, flustered, babbles to fill the silence.

"I know, right, what a thing to say, but you see, the thing is – Lydia's almost always completely right about these things. Once she got over the whole 'but I don't _want_ to be a banshee' thing and actually started paying attention to her powers, everything got so much clearer and, well, she's been having these dreams about you…yes, Isaac?"

Stiles stops speaking as Isaac puts a hand in the air, like he's asking a question in class.

"I think you lost him," Isaac says, jerking his head toward Derek, who's managed to maintain his impassive expression. In truth, Derek's doing a pretty good job of keeping up, but he's thankful for the respite from Stiles' chatter and a few seconds to marshal his thoughts. He met his fair share of the non-werewolf supernatural community growing up – there was that tribe of nymphs that stayed with them for a summer when their home river was having a dam built in; that disaster with the Ala when he was eight, which humans explained away as the worst winter in New England's last two centuries; the Fae territory 100 miles from Hale land, its border always a social faux pas away from eruption; and, of course, the never-ending rumor of a leprechaun uprising from the vales of Ireland.

Not that Derek believes in leprechauns.

But banshees? _Sure, why not?_

Derek prides himself on not freaking out during those few seconds of silence. He doesn't know much about banshees – they're really just stories you tell cubs to get them to eat their vegetables – but he's heard that the Wailing Women do, in fact, have extremely prescient foreknowledge of the fates of others. It's not usually blind fortune telling, though – a banshee's powers are strongest for the people she's closest to. Derek and Lydia have obviously never met, so he has to ask: "Who the hell is Lydia? Don't tell me she goes to Greymar, too."

"Stanford," Danny volunteers. "Applied mathematics."

"She's pack, though," Scott's quick to amend. "Banshee and distance aside, she's pack."

"Same with Kira," says Isaac.

"Kitsune, in Japan," Danny supplies.

"And Malia."

"Werecoyote. Also at Stanford."

If Derek had been standing, he would have sat down hard at this rapid-fire explanation of the pack's satellite members. As it is, he just slumps a little deeper in his chair. "Okay, so banshee-girl says I'm going to die. Does she know how?"

Stiles and Scott exchange sideways looks.

"You've gotten a lot of new information today," Scott says slowly.

"Yeah!" Stiles jumps in enthusiastically. "Maybe we can just reconvene next Sunday – you know, give you a chance to soak it all in –."

"You're burnt alive," Tink interrupts loudly, just seconds before Bree slaps a hand over her mouth. Derek's brain immediately starts to go cloudy, and he's only dimly aware of Scott protesting that Tink wasn't supposed to be listening and Tink insisting that she's nearly _fourteen_ for Christ's sake, she's not a little kid anymore –

_Derek is twenty-three years old and completely, irrevocably, irretrievably in love with Kate Argent. _

_ Kate Argent. Katherine Argent. Katherine Rose Argent. Even her _name_ is beautiful. _

I'm going to tell them today, _he resolves, looking at himself sternly in the rearview mirror as he takes a sharp curve on the road back to the pack house. _We've been together for a year, and I need to tell them. Yeah, she's from a hunting family, but she loves me and I love her, and once they get to know her, they'll understand. They'll _have_ to understand.

_He's so engrossed in his pump-up talk that he doesn't notice it until all six senses kick in at once. He smells it – smoke on the wind, wood and meat and plastic and fabric and metal. He feels it – heat in the air streaming in his windows. He sees it – a billowing spiral of black smoke, half a mile straight ahead. He tastes it – scorched air singeing against his tongue in an explosion of ash and ember. He hears it – the crackle, the roar, and the screams that are destined to wake him up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat for years to come. _

_ And he feels it. In the most animalistic, primal, wolf-driven part of his brain, he feels it. _

_ He now knows how it feels to be hunted. _

_ He takes the last turn so quickly that two of his wheels leave the ground and then he's out of the car – did he even turn it off? or put it in park? – pelting full-tilt across the lawn toward the inferno that used to be the only place in the world where he actually stood a chance of belonging. _

_ He can't get within ten feet of the house. The air is thicker than blood and the heat is searing the top layers of skin away faster than he can heal. He paces frantically, sprinting short distances to try to get a better angle, rage and helplessness threatening to overtake him completely. His thoughts are coming in fits and starts, and he recognizes that he's regressing into the wolf, all _pack _and _help _and _pack _and _family _and _please please please no _and then something shatters above him and glass rains down on his shoulders. A large, indecipherable figure catapults through the second-story window an instant, hitting the ground hard and breaking into two pieces. _

_ Cora. Uncle Peter. _

_ Peter drags Cora out of the fire by one arm and deposits her near Derek's feet, and he forces himself to focus on her face and stay. Stay human, stay sane, stay rational, just…stay. She's burned, but not terribly. Her heart is beating. She's breathing. She'll heal. _

_ "Derek!" he finally hears, and then Peter's hands are on his shoulders, claws _snick-_ing_ _out just enough to break flesh. There's more blood and bone on Peter's face than skin. "Are you okay?" _

_ "Where is everyone else?" he hears himself yell, looking frantically past Peter and starting to try to force his way into the fire again. "My mom and dad, Aunt Sara, Laura, David?"_

_ Peter plants his heels and wraps his arms around Derek's chest to hold him back. "It's too late." _

_ "What are you talking about? We just have to get inside – or maybe they already got away?" Derek's finding it harder to breathe and see between the tears and the smoke and the tight loop of fear secured around his throat that is tightening, tightening, tightening. _

_ "Derek!" Peter throws all his weight forward at once, bulling Derek to the ground and wrestling until he's pinned his nephew against the blackened grass. "It's too late. The fire forced everyone downstairs, to the basement." _

_ "There are windows!" Derek shouts, struggling against Peter's hands. "The hatched windows, just above ground!"_

_ "Locked!" Peter bellows. "We made it to the basement and tried to get out, but the windows were locked from the outside!" _

_ Derek hears Peter continue that he realized Cora was missing and broke through the flames to get to her, but it was too hot and killed whoever tried to come after him. He hears it, but his brain is a million miles away – actually, it's 5.2 miles away, with a stunningly pretty blonde who has a laugh like music, a smile like a secret, and a key to the basement windows of the Hale house so she can sneak in and meet Derek in the middle of the night. _

– a hand on his chest, warm brown eyes locking him into place, and long, spindly fingers wrapping around his right wrist and forcing his palm flat over Stiles' heart. Derek snaps back to the present, vision tunneling in and out, and all he can hear is Stiles' calm, even-pitched voice, asking him to breathe and focus on Stiles' heartbeat and breathe and the feel of the boy's baseball tee under his fingers and breathe and heartbeat, breathe and heartbeat, breathe and heartbeat.

"What in the ever-loving fuck was that?" Cole demands, earning him a sharp cuff to the back of the head from Bree and a shushing from nearly everyone else.

"Panic attack," Stiles says quietly, still holding Derek together at the seams with his steady gaze. "I used to get them all the time. You okay, man?"

Derek considers. The faces around him look back with concern and kind understanding and openness and pity, and it builds in a wave that topples his tenuous stability to the ground. Then he's on his feet, out the door, headed to the forest, ready to run and run and run like the guilty fucking coward that he is.

* * *

He gets back to his apartment building a few hours later and finds Scott leaning against the side of his Camaro, Derek's shoes resting next to him.

"You left a couple things behind," the Alpha says, straightening up. "Danny hotwired it, so it'll be totally fine. Bring it back to the firehouse sometime and he'll put the wires back in."

Derek nods mutely, raising a hand to take the proffered sneakers. Scott forks them over and shoves his hands into the pockets of his leather bomber jacket. "Look, man, what went down tonight was pretty heavy, and Tink shouldn't have – I mean – crap, where's Stiles when you need him? It was heavy. And a lot to take in."

Derek doesn't say anything.

"It's fine by me that you're here, fine that you don't want to join the pack. But I promised your uncle that we'd try not to let you get killed, and Lydia's pretty worked up about you being in danger. So here." He pulls one hand free and gives Derek a slightly crumpled piece of paper. "Phone numbers and emails for me, Isaac, and Stiles. Anything weird happens, give one of us a call? Pack meeting every Sunday at 7, and you're always welcome."

Scott rolls out his shoulders like he's physically shaking off the Alpha mantle, then starts to walk down the street, presumably back to the firehouse. Derek watches him for a minute, then abruptly breaks into a jog and catches up. If Scott's surprised, he has the good grace not to show it. He stays silent, waiting for Derek to speak.

"What happened with Kate," he begins slowly, not sure entirely where he's going with this or why he feels compelled to explain himself. "It wasn't – I'm not, like, emotionally damaged or anything stupid like that."

"Most of your family was killed by the girl you were in love with," Scott says, the blunt words somehow sounding gentle coming from him. "If you're not carrying around some sort of baggage, then you're a sociopath."

"I just mean…ugh," Derek sighs, letting his head fall back so he can watch the night sky as he keeps in step with Scott. "I'm not a person who freaks out. I'm steady. Controlled. A good man in the storm."

"I believe you."

They're quiet again for half a block or so. It's a nice night, all things considered – clear skies, hazy moon, and Derek can feel the autumn air just starting lead with a biting edge.

"I met Kate, you know," Scott says suddenly.

Derek looks at him sharply. "What?"

"Yeah. Couple years back, when all of this was just getting started. She was Allison's aunt."

_Aunt? Kate never mentioned having a niece._

Scott smiles sadly at the sidewalk, clearly lost in memories both good and painful. "You would have liked Allison. Everyone liked Allison. It was impossible not to like Allison."

"What happened?"

Scott lets out a half-growl. "I _just_ met you, dude. Like, _today_."

"I know that," Derek acknowledges. "But – don't take this the wrong way – your pack has a lot of…triggers. Landmines, almost. I need to know what to watch out for so I don't step on something wrong and blow us all up."

Scott grunts at this and kicks at a crack in the sidewalk. "Short version tonight. You haven't earned the details yet."

Derek nods in agreement and waits. _This is good. _Getting information, bonding with the Alpha, not talking about himself. This is good. He can handle this.

"Allison and her parents moved to Beacon Hills when we were in high school. We fell in love before we knew that I was a werewolf and she came from a hunting family. We didn't know anything back then – the Alpha that bit me took off, and we just sort of had to make it up as we went along. My boss, Deaton, sometimes helped but was mostly just a mysterious not-always veterinarian."

_Deaton_, Derek muses. The name sounds familiar, but he doesn't interrupt. Scott guides them around a corner and trails his fingers along a streetlamp before resuming the story. "After a while, Stiles and I figured out that her family were hunters, but Allison still didn't know anything. Then Kate came to visit – she's Allison's dad's sister. Kate and Gerard came to town and everything just kind of…exploded."

"Gerard, Kate's father?"

Scott nods. "Kate's, and Chris's. Allison's dad."

Derek's mind spins. He'd had the unpleasant experience of meeting Gerard a time or two when he and Kate were together, but there'd never been any indication that Gerard had any children besides Kate.

"Anyway," Scott says, starting to talk a little faster. "Like I said, everything exploded, but eventually Chris and Allison started to see things our way. Wrote their own version of the code, stopped hating wolves just for being wolves. Then we broke up, she sort of started dating Isaac, and then she died."

"Wait, what?" Derek blurts, having been completely unprepared for Scott to get to the point so succinctly.

Scott kicks at another crack. "She died. Fighting a demon – one of the tails of a kitsune, if you need to know."

"Fucking hell," Derek says under his breath.

Scott nods. "It nearly broke all of us, nearly tore the pack apart. Chris, Isaac, Lydia, and me – we've never really been the same. You can't go back, you know?"

"We move forward with the marks from those we've loved inscribed on our souls," Derek says automatically.

Scott gives him a startled look. "You're a poet all of a sudden?"

"It's part of a traditional werewolf funeral ceremony," Derek explains. He should know, he said the phrase 15 times over during the mass memorial for his family.

"We have those?" Scott makes a face somewhere between awed and irritated.

Derek squints at him. "You don't know very much about being a werewolf, do you?"

At this, Scott lets out a full-throated growl complete with red eye flash, and Derek's wolf fucking _whines_ and very nearly forces him to his knees. "Sorry," Derek chokes out. "I didn't mean it like that. You seem like a good Alpha and all, it's just obvious that you're missing a lot of the pieces."

Scott cross his arms defensively, eyes still red. "Like I said, we had to figure a lot of it out as we went along. I didn't exactly have a wolfy Yoda to teach me."

"Star Wars?"

"Stiles made me. And coined the phrase."

Derek nods – it makes total sense that Stiles is a sci-fi nerd. "I really didn't mean offense. But there's an entire werewolf subculture across the country – across the world, really. Gatherings, festivals, traditions. It kinda sounds like your pack's been spending so much time fighting for your lives that you haven't had a chance to learn any of that."

Scott visibly brightens, eyes fading back to dark brown. "Could you teach us?"

Derek blinks in surprise. "Teach you?"

"Yeah! I mean, you know all of these things, and you're out here without a pack, and we need – you could be my wolfy Yoda! Unless there's, like, a textbook. _How to be a Werewolf in the 21st Century for Dummies_."

"No, but there's a Facebook page."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. Some of the people in it are just deranged _Twilight_ fans, but it's the best way to stay in contact and organize the solstices."

"Dude."

Scott's looking at him with such amazement that Derek can't stop a grin from slipping onto his face for a few seconds, but ultimately shakes his head. "I don't think so, Scott. I like you guys – well, you, anyway, and Danny and Ethan seem okay – but I moved out here to get away from all of it. Being a werewolf is what got my family killed."

"Forward with our souls marked by our loved ones," Scott says, butchering the memorial phrase but getting the basic concept right. "Moving forward and running from the past aren't the same thing."

Derek doesn't know how to respond to that, but it sounds like something his dad would have said. His dad had been a bear of a wolf – huge and powerful and terrifying – but the epitome of a man – honest, sturdy, and true to his core. He would have liked Scott. He would have helped Scott.

Maybe he _can _do this. Show up to pack meetings every once in a while, talk about what he knows of werewolf life and tradition. _Be Scott's wolfy Yoda, _he thinks with a roll of his eyes. Stiles is going to be the death of him. Royally fucking screwed, honestly.

"You're wrong about something, you know," Scott says, and when he stops walking Derek realizes it's because he's guided them in a full circle, and they're now back in front of Derek's apartment. He's still carrying his shoes in one hand.

"What?"

"Being a werewolf isn't what got your family killed. I met Kate, saw her in action, and everything about that woman fucking terrified me, man. What got your family killed was a crazy bitch with an unfounded vendetta."

That _also _sounds like something Derek's dad would have said.

"I'll think about it," he says after a beat. "Teaching you what I know, I mean."

Bless Scott's goddamn heart if he doesn't perk up like a puppy presented with a toy. "Really?"

"I don't know everything, and I'm not saying I'll be around all the time. But I'll come to pack meetings when I can, and when I'm there, I'll, you know…share."

Scott _hugs_ him. It's a quick thing – handshake-chestbump-backthump would be a more accurate term than "hug", really – but Scott hugs him nonetheless, and Derek honestly cannot remember the last time someone purposefully made physical contact with him other than the couple mixed martial arts crowds he'd run with back in New England.

"It'll be great, I promise. Anyway, dude, good talk, but it's a school night and I've got a 9AM. See you next Sunday? Unless you see any of that hellish shit Stiles mentioned coming your way, in which case, _call_. Oh, and Derek – _werewolf subculture_? Really?"

Derek shrugs. "I'm an English professor."

* * *

On Friday, Derek goes on a date.

Her name is Hannah. She's twenty-four, a PhD candidate in the Anthropology department, and he met her at a faculty mixer that Austin, the other young professor in the English department, dragged him to. She's pretty and charming and blindingly intelligent, and she doesn't seem to mind the occasional silence between them. They chat casually through dinner, attend an experimental jazz concert held in someone's attic ("Fascinating," murmurs Hannah. _Actively offensive_, thinks Derek.), and walk back to her apartment the long way. Derek's in that agonizing moment of trying to decide if he should ask for a second date or just go in for the goodnight kiss when his phone buzzes loudly, startling the both of them.

"Sorry," he apologizes, scrabbling to get it out of his pocket. "Sorry, I could have sworn I turned it off – what the hell?" He stares at the caller ID – Stiles. (Yes, he programmed their numbers into his phone.) Why in the hell is Stiles calling him at 1 in the morning?

He peeks up at Hannah, who's smiling at him. "It's okay," she says. "Go ahead and answer."

"Are you sure? I'm sure it's nothing, it's just these kids I know –."

The rest of whatever weak excuse he's going to make is cut off when she steps forward, rests her hands on his chest, and presses up onto her toes to kiss him. It's short and sweet, and Derek's heart coughs and turns over like the engine of a car that's been sitting in a garage gathering dust for years.

"Answer," she breathes, pulling back. Derek moves with her, but she pushes him away gently and he lets her keep him at bay. "Answer that now, and call me later?"

He nods, too dumbfounded for words, and watches her bounce up the stairs into her building. Then he swipes to answer the call and growls, "This had better be a really big fucking deal, or I'll rip your spleen out of your body and eat it in front of you."

"Charming," Stiles says. "Where are you? I've got an errand to run, and Scott says you're coming with me."

* * *

This is how Derek winds up climbing out of Stiles' jeep at five on a Saturday morning in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere, Washington. After it became clear that Stiles wasn't going to divulge the destination or purpose of their little road trip, he'd dozed off, expecting to be woken up in twenty minutes or so. But no, Stiles had driven straight through the night, they've crossed state lines, and Derek had only woken up as the passed into Olympic National Forest. Now he blinks owlishy in the pale yellow fingers of dawn creeping over the horizon and shivers – it's cold up here in the mountains, even for a werewolf.

Stiles comes around the back of the Jeep and hands him a sweatshirt – the hoodie Derek smelled on the first day of class.

"Thanks," he says grudgingly. "Are you going to tell me what the hell we're doing up here? Besides severely trying my patience?"

Stiles hauls a duffel bag out of the trunk but doesn't say anything. Derek watches him carefully, assessing the younger man with something perhaps close to concern – but that's only natural, because Stiles looks like _hell_. He'd looked tired when he picked Derek up, but now, with sunlight throwing his features into sharp relief, Derek can tell that there's more to it than that. The bags beneath Stiles' eyes look like they've been bruised to the bone, he's paler than he should be, and every line in his shoulders speaks to tension and exhaustion. Derek's on the verge of asking what's wrong when Stiles shoves a second duffel bag at him, locks the Jeep, and sets off into the woods. Derek quickly shoulders the bag and pursues, horribly intrigued by this quieter, still-er, darker Stiles.

They hike for forty-five minutes before Stiles speaks. "For the record, I don't want you here."

"Okay, so why am I?"

"Scott thought it would be a good idea," Stiles says, frustration creeping into his voice.

"A good idea for what?"

Derek follows Stiles out of the trees and into a clearing, bathed in dusky blue and rays of pink. His eyes are immediately drawn to the tree dead center in the clearing, and his Yeats, Longfellow, Whitman, Thoreau, and Frost-loving brain starts searching for the right words to describe it, because this is not just a _tree_. This is a Tree – you could the old Hale house in it five times over, all stacked up on top of one another. If you cut it down – and surely it would be an unforgivable crime against nature to cut down such a Tree – you could make Noah's ark. Twice. It stretches up toward the sky with arms of brown and green and orange and red; plunges roots as thick as his torso deep into the earth, an anchor to the ground and pathway to the heavens all at once. And there's even more – a tingle has set up at the base of his spine, a tingle he's started to subconsciously associate with the non-werewolf magical world.

Stiles interrupts Derek's poetic waxings by dropping his duffel bag unceremoniously to the ground and starting to dig things out of it. Large candles, a coil of rope, bunches of plant clippings, and jars of dust or some other substance emerge. Curious, Derek peeks inside the bag he's carrying, but this one's contents are much more mundane: food and a blanket.

Derek holds in his questions, as it's apparent that Stiles is just going to be standoffish and silent. So while Stiles begins to set up whatever it is he's doing, Derek prowls a wide circle around the edge of the clearing, the tingle in his spine starting to make him uneasy. The tree is so large that he loses sight of Stiles for a while during each loop, and the boy takes a solid thirty minutes clearing his chosen site, arranging the candles and leaves, spreading the ashes, and carving intricate symbols into the dirt with the sharp end of a broken stick. Finally, he walks a circle around the Tree, making a loop with the rope, ties the other end to his right ankle, and resumes his place in the middle of all his candles. Derek stops his pacing and takes up a squat in a good vantage point, off to the side.

After several more minutes' silence, in which Derek watches Stiles sway slightly back and forth from his heels to toes and listens to the wind rustling half-fallen leaves, Stiles speaks.

Or chants. Or sings. Or screams, or whispers, or laughs – it's somehow all of these things and none of them, and it's in a language Derek's known since the day he was born but has never heard before.

The candles and circles of ash blaze up around Stiles. He doesn't seem to notice.

Lines of light spiral up the trunk of the tree. Stiles doesn't seem to notice.

His feet leave the ground and he inches upward into the sky, tethered down only by the rope around his ankle, and he doesn't seem to notice.

Derek's not sure how long the three of them are like that – Stiles, floating twenty feet above the ground and oblivious; the Tree, shooting small sparks in every direction; Derek, transfixed by the scene in front of him. It could be minutes, it could be hours, but when it ends, it does so suddenly that he nearly misses it.

A pulse of light and force blasts out of the tree in every direction, and he just has time to process that it looks like an ever-expanding dome before the shockwave knocks him on his ass. Stiles falls out of the sky and hits the ground hard, unmoving, and Derek stumbles over – he's half blind and deaf from the pulse, and his healing hasn't kicked in yet. By the time he reaches the younger man, Stiles is stirring and groaning.

Derek wants to ask if he's okay, but there's a more demanding question that gets out first. "What in the _hell_ was that?"

Stiles weakly pushes Derek's face out of his line of vision. "Food first, Eyebrows. Then we'll talk."

Derek impatiently gets up, snags the second duffel, and dumps its contents near Stiles feet. Stiles painstakingly confects a beef jerky, peanut butter, and jelly bean sandwich and devours it in two seconds flat, by which Derek is both repulsed and impressed. He chugs about a liter of water, pulls a massive container of cold curly fries toward him, and finally looks Derek in the eye and says, "So, what do you want to know?"

Derek lets out a short bark of a laugh at the sheer absurdity of that question while Stiles continues to inhale food like he hasn't eaten in a week. _What do I want to know? I just – I mean – well, _obviously_, because…_

He gives up trying to make his thoughts behave, shakes out the blanket Stiles packed, and sits down. "You're not a Druid."

Stiles grins through a mouthful of fries and marshmallow fluff, which is more than a little disgusting to behold. "Not even a little bit."

Derek nods, pondering this. He steals the remainder of Stiles' beef jerky and chews thoughtfully. "What's the tree?"

"It's a Nemeton. The Druids consider it one of their sacred spaces, but it's really just a power hub that almost any magical anything can use to juice up."

"And that's what you just did." It's not a question – there's no doubt that Stiles looks significantly more alive and healthy now than he did when they got out of the Jeep.

Stiles shrugs and washes a mouthful of food down with a swig of orange juice. "That's part of it. You know the blast?" He makes an explosion gesture with his hands, and Derek nods. "It's a ward. 200 miles in every direction. It lets me know when any supernatural beasties cross the boundary. It's pretty draining to watch such a big area, though, so every couple weeks I come up here and use the Nemeton to recharge."

Derek's math isn't great, but he knows that a circle 400 miles across covers a pretty fucking huge patch of land. And ocean, since they're on the peninsula. "Why not make the ward closer to Greymar and keep it small?"

"The pack aren't the only ones I care about," Stiles says simply, untying the rope from his ankle. Having eaten his weight in junk food, he flops onto the blanket next to Derek and yawns up at the sky. "If you have more questions, ask them fast – I've got maybe five minutes before I fall asleep, and I'll be out until Monday."

"_Monday?"_

"It takes a lot out of me," Stiles says nonchalantly, but Derek can see the truth in the statement. The adrenaline of whatever he just did seems to be wearing off.

"What was the point of bringing me?" He asks abruptly. "Was this some sort of warning from Scott? Because you're obviously pretty fucking powerful – he's saying that if I screw with the pack, he'll sic you on me?"

"What?" Stiles says, struggling up to his elbows. "Don't be an idiot. That's not Scott at all – Ethan, maybe, or Isaac, or Bree on a bad day, but not Scott. He thought it might help you, I don't know, rest easier at night. Knowing that there's more out there protecting you than a bunch of college students. He also thought you might be more likely to let us help you if you feel like we trust you."

Derek raises an eyebrow. "How does _this_ mean that you trust me?"

Stiles lets his elbows collapse. "Like you said, I'm pretty fucking powerful." There's no pride in his voice when he says this – there's actually a little resentment, if Derek's not totally off his reading-people game. "Once word gets out that you can do things like put up a 126,000-square mile ward, there's no end to the sorcerers and Druids and warlocks and Fae that want to grab you and do all sorts of nasty things to you until you agree to be on their side." A visible shudder runs through Stiles' body, and Derek wonders just how much Stiles has been through in his 20 years. "So you could probably easily make enough money or earn enough favors by selling me out to whatever creepy contacts you may have to set you and your children's children up for life. Or you could just kill me while we're out here, since I'm just a defenseless human."

"I don't think 'defenseless' is a word I'd use to describe you."

"Oh, but that's the best part!" Stiles says cheerfully. "I can't use it to defend _myself_. If something's coming after me and me alone, it just…fizzles. Last week at the firehouse, if you'd tried to attack me instead of Cole and Tink, you probably would have been highly successful at ripping my throat out."

Derek's silent for a moment, then mumbles, "_Shit_."

"Amen, Sourwolf. Two-minute warning – you're going to have to carry me back to the Jeep and drive home, by the way. Or, you know, leave me out here in the woods and let wolves eat my unconscious, healing body."

Two minutes? Derek has at least sixty more questions, and that's just off the top of his head. He picks the one that, for some unknown reason, keeps circling back to the top of the list. "Scott wanted me here. You didn't. Why?"

Stiles is quiet for a few seconds. Derek's about to protest the wasting of precious Q&A time when he finally starts speaking in short, careful sentences. "Scott trusts you. And most of the pack will trust you, because Scott does. But I know what happened to your family, and I know you think it's your fault. And I know what that does to a person. I know how unstable it makes you. I know little it takes to set you off."

A minute passes. When Stiles speaks again, it's even quieter.

"It took me a long time to be able to trust myself again, and even now, most days are shaky. So Scott can trust you, but I don't. Not yet. And now, in addition to everything else, I get to live with you having this power over me. One word in the right ear, and I'm dead. Or worse than dead."

"I'm not going to do that, Stiles."

"Sure. Scratch out the symbols and pick up the candles before we leave, okay?"

Derek hears Stiles' heartbeat slow down and his breathing lengthen out as he drifts to sleep. He watches the sun rise properly, chasing shadows back into the forest and warming their little clearing so that as he's packing up the supplies, it's warm enough for him to take off the loaned sweatshirt. As he tugs it over his head, the tag catches his eye: _J. Stilinski _is scrawled across it in messy permanent marker. Filing that away under "Landmines to ask Scott about Later," he slings both duffels over one shoulder, bundles Stiles up over the other, and follows their trail back through the woods.


End file.
